7/07/2003 @ 12:00AM

Pay Up!

A promising way to curb spam: Charge the sender.

Hoping to stop the evil epidemic of spam,
Philip Raymond
is putting a price on it. The 46-year-old software executive has a provisional patent on a service called Vanquish, which requires e-mail senders to post a cash bond of 5 cents into a bank account for every piece of e-mail they send. If a recipient judges the mail to be illegitimate, the sender loses the nickel, with four pennies going to the recipient’s Internet service provider and one penny going to Vanquish as a processing fee. If the recipient okays the message, that sender is cleared from then on. But if the human or machine behind the spam won’t post a bond, the message doesn’t go through.

With Internet service providers processing 6.9 billion spam messages a day, the price for senders could add up quickly. “We don’t search for combinations of words and numbers,” Raymond says. “We let recipients decide if they want it.”

In a trial of the service, 400 customers from eight small Internet service providers were offered Vanquish for free. Vanquish blocked spam cold, but users also experienced installation problems and delays in checking e-mail. Vanquish, based outside Boston, says it has fixed the glitches for its June launch, and aims to have a lofty 35 million users by the end of the year. It expects ISPs to pay 20 to 45 cents per customer per month.

Raymond, who has started and sold two previous tech firms, figures that legitimate marketers, accustomed to paying for their messages in other media, will understand and appreciate Vanquish. As it is, private filtering systems and spam blacklists block plenty of marketers’ e-mails. Yahoo and AOL have destroyed messages between Procter & Gamble and customers who agreed to be contacted, as well as acceptance letters to Harvard University applicants.

Raymond has a good idea–other firms such as IronPort have also announced spam-bond products–but doesn’t have much money. Vanquish is burning through $38,000 a month, even with three engineers working for one-third of their usual salary. Recently Raymond had to beg his advisory board for another $75,000.